New Tutorial in The Witcher 2 Update 2.0 Addresses Steep Difficulty Curve

The Witcher 2 update 2.0 brings quite a lot of new features to the role-playing game, including a brand new tutorial at the beginning of the story, which serves to address the many complaints received by developer CD Projekt Red about the steep learning curve that drove away many players.

CD Projekt Red is definitely keeping busy these days, as not only is it working hard on the Xbox 360 version of The Witcher 2, but also on the upcoming 2.0 update for the game on the PC.

We already talked about both versions during our extensive Gamescom 2011 coverage, and now the developer has detailed the tutorial issues during an exclusive interview with Softpedia at the large gaming convention last week.

CD Projekt Red's Ziemak Marek, level designer at the Polish studio, admitted the problems with the tutorial already implemented in The Witcher 2 when it first came out, citing the fact that the Normal difficulty was tested primarily on people already accustomed to the game.

"We had a steep learning curve and that was a problem," Ziemak admitted to us. "There were two problems. First of all the balance, which wasn't excellent. Second was our idea to make Normal a bit more challenging, because that's the way we wanted players to experience The Witcher. But, of course, we tried it on professional testers and ourselves, so the challenge wasn't that apparent. After we saw the reviews, with many people telling us that Normal was quite hard, we realized our problem."

Ziemak then went on to describe how the new and improved tutorial behaves, saying that it's not just a series of doors or separate segments describing various gameplay sequences in-depth, nor is it just the regular tutorial, but with more tooltips or extra text crammed in.

"The new tutorial feels like a story. It's still a tutorial so we're talking about things taken out of the game's reality, but we're telling them in a pleasant way for the players."

Stay tuned for more The Witcher 2 news later this week when we'll publish more details from our talk with CD Projekt's Ziemak Marek.